RIP Steve Jobs

I read every word of the Steve Jobs obit in the paper, when we first moved down here in 1979, Mark and I lived down in the thick of it, in Cupertino where Apple built its headquarters. Those were the days when the last of the apricot orchards and pruneyards were giving way to the corporate sprawl of the Silicon Valley. I worked at a company near Stanford that was one of the first to adopt the MacIntosh computers (they made excellent dumb terminals), it sat just a half a mile from the buildings housing the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center where the graphical bit-mapped screen and mouse user interface that inspired the Mac were developed.

I think I probably laid hands on every single one of Steve Jobs' products over the years, nearly every model of MacIntosh, it's true I didn't get into iPods or iPhones until recently, I still don't have an iPad, but I have a birthday coming up. AND my home is three blocks from Pixar, which Steve Jobs also founded.

I admired that electrical engineer/wonk/mba/entrepreneur icon that Steve Jobs represented, but I've never thought of him as a hero, though like everyone I was affected by what he did. But I did like the bare feet part.